The current cost of 1-80 hierlooms on the PTR is much higher then it should be. Teir 10-251 gear costs 695/1100 JP, whereas the heirlooms cost 2700/3500 JP.

Can you confirm that we can still do the ToC dailies in ice crown for those badges and buy heirloom items with them after 4.01/cata is released?
They'll still be available and purchased using Justice Points, and Justice Points will be the currency that drops from ... pretty much everything. Anything that dropped any emblem or badge anywhere will drop Justice Points (as long as you're of the correct level range). (Source)

On the current PTR build, they still cost Champion's Seals at the Argent Pavilion.
Yes, and they will continue to. Confirmed that there are no planned changes for the Argent Tournament heirlooms prices or otherwise.

Blue Posts

Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment

Level 80 Balancing in 4.0.1
Here's the deal: level 80 is going to be a little crazy. There is a reason we're going to end the PvP season before the next patch goes live. There is a reason we had to make PvE adjustments, such as Chill of the Throne. Critical new abilities aren't available until higher level. Combat ratings are much higher than they will be once everyone starts leveling, and likely higher than they ever will be again. Health ratios are much lower than they will be with higher level gear.

We're not totally throwing up our hands at level 80, but it's also far less of a concern than level 85. If there is truly broken stuff going on, we'll fix it, but some things will also fix themselves once you can level again.

The "lame duck session" before a new expansion goes live is always a little odd and exciting. My advice is to chill a little, sit back, and watch Deathwing destroy your world. (Source)

Tank Threat buff in latest build
We did recently buff the threat generated by Defensive Stance and its equivalents.

Note that with this change, the threat generated by tanks will be about the same as it is on live, which is that a tank can generate about three times as much threat as a dps class.

On live, remember that classes like rogues have an innate threat reduction, warriors have reduced threat in Battle or Berserker Stance, and mages had talents to reduce threat generated. We removed all of those. Until this recent change, that left tank threat slightly low relative to live. We hoped Vengeance would have made up for the loss of Tricks, Misdirect and (to a lesser extent) Vigilance, but in retrospect we think we were still underestimating how much they were buoying tank threat.

If you never used Tricks or Misdirect, then threat should feel about the same in Cataclysm as it does on live. If you use Tricks and Misdirect on live, then you might need Vengeance stacked before you feel the same, but at the same time Tricks and Misdirect still work just fine for establishing initial aggro before Vengeance has a chance to stack anyway. (Source)

AE Tanking and Crowd Controlit seems like Blizzard wants to take tanks back to the Vanilla days of "Tank 1 mob and CC the rest".
We think doing that sometimes and AE'ing sometimes is preferable to the world of AE'ing everything all the time. If all you are doing is trying to process dungeons as fast as possible to get to the badges, then I can understand that mentality, but it's not one we want to foster. (Source)

Paladin (Forums / 3.3.5 Talent Calculator / Cataclysm Talent Calculator / Beta Skills/Talents)Retribution and Crowd Control
We think there is a risk that Ret is overly susceptible to spammed snares or roots. One idea we are trying (standard no promises) is to let Cleanse remove snares or roots when a Ret paladin uses it on himself. That implementation would keep one of the most important uses of Cleanse, without letting Ret strip away buffs and debuffs, which is something we're really trying to clamp down on (for everyone).

We also discussed the oft-suggested idea of making Freedom not dispellable when used on yourself, but our concern there was a Ret would never ever Freedom anyone else and face the dispel risk, so something that was once group utility just becomes a self buff. (As I have referenced before, one of our goals around Ret PvP is to make the spec more of a team player and less of a guy who has an answer for everything.) We still think undispellable Freedom, even for Ret only, is just too powerful. (Source)

Single Target/AE HealingMy point, and maybe it was said a little too tersely, is that Pallies are BY DESIGN supposed to have slightly weaker AoE heals than everyone else, with the counter-balance that their single-target (tank) healing is slighly stronger than everyone else. If you don't like that, then you will be much happier in the longer term rerolling a different healer, since Blizz does not seem like they are budging on this viewpoint.
It's not that we want paladins to be single target healers. It's that we felt like we had to give the healers very similar single target spells (a decision that many healers object to, I should point out) so we are loathe to just give paladins Chain Heal or Circle of Healing. Yes, Holy Radiance and Ray of Light (and even Beacon) are pretty unusual spells. That doesn't mean they have to be terrible by definition. We understand that it's pretty common for the community, upon finding something wanting in their class, to look across the aisle at another class and say "Ooh, I want that!" It's a challenge to keep the 5 healing specs unique, but it's also very important to us. The OP calls those gimmicks. We call it trying to avoid homogenization. (Source)

Conflagration scaling
Conflag behaving a little differently with regard to haste is cool, and certainly better than the alternative, which is that it doesn't care about haste at all.

So then the question is whether it does too much damage with high haste. It might at level 80 and probably won't at level 85. (Source)

ShadowboltHe's been doing that a lot to us lately.. "Shadow Bolt will be affliction's filler when not refreshing dots etc." But it has been proven that DL is indeed better than SB as afflictions filler on the ptr/beta.
Again, in this case, my information is more up to date, and I predict you'll be using Shadow Bolt. (Source)

What's this? an actual BUFF for hunters? I guess they can't always kick them to the dirt. But they can't go too far, god forbid hunters can be good at the one role they can fill especially after changing their whole mechanic.

Man I can't wait till all these ungrateful pos dpsers who cry and complain about tanks have to wait 30 to 45 minutes in a queue.

It's about time they buffed hunters, they really did need it. They have brutalized them too much. Hunters are one of the few non hybrid classes. (mage, lock, hunter, rogue) and 3 out of those 4 have been given HUGE buffs, while hunters got some they were quickly nerfed. Buff em up blizz. They only get to do one thing, let them do it to the gd best. (oh boohoo you playz hunter) yeah, that's why I QQ so much about my paladin. Secretly I want to be a hunter =P

More like it was listened to. The change will ultimately help with single-target tanking which was seriously hurting, rather than AoE tanking. I'm certain that the limited CDs on AoE threat abilities will still prevent the AoE tank faceroll-a-thon.